jpdoctor

It looks like facebook likes without the rest of facebook, or did I miss something?

But it takes a special kind of arrogance for this young man to believe that his moral judgment on the dilemma suddenly trumps that of two (incredibly different) presidents, both houses of the U.S. Congress, both political parties, the U.S. court system and more than 30,000 of his co-workers.

Conversely, it takes a special kind of arrogance for two (incredibly different) presidents, both houses of the U.S. Congress, both political parties, the U.S. court system and more than 30,000 of his co-workers to ignore the fact that 54% of people surveyed think this is a good thing.

http://swampland.time.com/2013/06/13/new-time-poll-support-f...

I'm trying to figure out the barrier-to-entry for scam artists, and they seem pretty low.

Richard Stallman – the creator of GNU Emacs, the founder of GNU

Did anybody think he was secretly using vi in the closet?

Are all of these bootstrapped, or are some of them self-funded?

HN doesn't seem to make the distinction, for self-funding of less than $100K.

The thing I find particularly fatuous: "We were bootstrapped until we took VC money", as if everyone who takes VC money isn't in the same camp. I guess the company I founded was bootstrapped until our A round valued at $40M. Hey I created a $40M company by bootstrapping!

The poster is confusing the amount of insolvency with the value of Detroit. The value of the city far exceeds the valuation of Google.

Sensitive personal information was encrypted and cannot be accessed, however, we have not been able to rule out the possibility that some developers’ names, mailing addresses, and/or email addresses may have been accessed.

So they can't rule out the possibility that sensitive personal information, which cannot be accessed, has been accessed. Got it.

Apparently our intelligence, which cannot be insulted, has been insulted.

To save everyone from having to look it up:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

I'm no Ch9 expert, but my understanding is that a receiver will be appointed. That person is not elected. So while the politicians retain executive power, the purse strings are taken away from them.

There will be much unhappiness and gnashing of teeth before it's all finished.

I particularly like the idea of promising firefighters a too-good pension, make them run into burning buildings to save people, and then reneging on the promise now that they won't be running into buildings any more. Serves them right for trusting a promise, the fools.

I wonder what effect that will have on future muni workers?

Even as a credit analyst, I agree that you can't really feel sorry for the bondholders here. If you want to lend in any market, you need to assume the risk that the debtor goes bankrupt. Pensioners are a different story though.

Very much agree.

However it's absolutely not true that "a lot of money in the US is being lent with the assumption that creditors will always be bailed out by the state or federal government", at least not a large amount relative to the total bond market size.

This is more subtle. While bankruptcies even on the scale of Detroit don't work with an implicit backstop assumption, large-scale muni bankruptcies on the scale predicted by Meredith Whitney are a different story. Let's face it: When push came to shove, Fannie and Freddie were not allowed to enter runoff mode.

There doesn't seem to be an opinion that this will kick over the can and start the bankruptcy run, but throw in a couple of more and the political&banking dynamics would turn interesting in a hurry.

What I don't see in the comments yet: This is interesting not only for Detroit, but for the precedent it sets. There are 10 or 15 municipalities that will study how to screw the retirees & bondholders as thoroughly as Detroit plans to and then go down that path.

You get used to noise is my guess. My dad grew up in New Haven in the 40s across from a fire house. When he moved out to the suburbs, he had trouble sleeping at first because it was too quiet.

We thought about raising funding [from family and friends] to get press. Then once the stories were done, we would just give it all back because we don’t need it.

People (and the press) need to stop printing nonsense like this. You don't need money? Then don't take it. Any other path screams: We needed money and we're gonna insult your intelligence with a press statement.

To his specific point: The cost of funding would buy a whole lotta press. So cut the crap.

Have you noticed any speed decrement in your learning curves (learning new languages or frameworks)?

Hard to tell, but a speedup if anything. Once you know 5 or 6 languages, another one is pretty easy to pick up by looking at it.

I've posted elsewhere: Most recent endeavor is RoR, and that was fast. It's hard for me to differentiate whether that's because I'm Mr Smart&Experienced or because Michael Hartl rocks. I suspect the latter.

Very much so.

Great quote btw. It made me google it-- seems Cory Harvey Armstrong. is the author, whoever that is.

Great questions, answers inline.

Have you encountered any agism in your line of work?

None, but I might be a weird case. When I finished grad school, I was hired by TI, then Bell Labs. Both treated me like royalty. Because I am not satisfied with being treated like royalty, I went out and founded a company during 2000. I raised a ton of money from VCs (money was free back then). Bootstrapped another. So I've been running my own businesses ever since.

Do you work with "trendy" languages and technologies or do you stick with tried-and-true, enterprisey type of stuff?

A bunch of years in there were hardware hacking. So lots of C and C++ through the 90s, some perl for maintainance. Never saw the need for trendy stuff until I saw Ruby on Rails. That made light work of projects I had in front of me.

Have you considered moving into management or have you always just preferred getting down on your hands and knees so to speak and hacking things together?

Largest management position was CTO of an 85 person company. I'm happy to manage people, and believe that I can manage over the range of herding-cats to drill-Sargent. I definitely prefer the role of Field Marshall to General, ie rolling in the mud with the troops compared to suit-and-tie rub-elbows-with-those-who-need-their-elbows-rubbed.

Lately though: All hacking + customer management. We're growing, so I suspect managing more people is going to be back in my future.

God these types of polls make me feel like a geezer.

Just in case any of you whippersnappers are wondering what it feels like to start hacking in your teens and continue (in one form or another) to be hacking into your late 40s: It is pretty much the same after the first cup of coffee in the morning. Where it differs is the lull in the afternoon makes me want to nap. (So I do.)

The drag is that until I look in the mirror? I'd tell you I'm 20-something, and I have to genuinely remind myself that I'm pushing 50.

Pretty sure he wouldn't be able to transfer anything close to a million before lock down, unless he had clearance.

Unless he started working with someone on the inside of PayPal of course. ("Dear Respected One, GREETINGS, Permit me to inform you of my desire of going into business relationship with you. I got your contact from the PayPal accounting department, and I have the believe you are a reputable and responsible and trustworthy person I can do business with from the little information so far I gathered....")

The first company that makes a device which only takes a stream from any website, buffers it, and then plays it to a TV is going to own the market.

Right now, every hardware company is trying to insert itself into the content chain. So you like Amazon Prime Streaming? Too bad, you don't get it on Apple TV. Still have a slingbox for some of your cable content? Your WD TV isn't going to play it. Want your Vizio CoStar to play out a major network? You're SOL. How about The Daily Show? Hahahahaha, I don't even know which box will/won't work from comedycentral.com.

The matrix of which box plays what content is fracturing this market before it ever gets off the ground. I look forward to the commodity box that identifies it's browser with the ID of a desktop.

I think the blog post missed the most important point of the NYT piece: Too often, he says, trials are against “a straw-man comparator” like a placebo rather than a competing drug. So the studies don’t really help us understand which treatments for a disease work best.

The standard is usually a placebo. This is done when you are not even sure the drug will have an effect.

The standard should be a competing drugs, otherwise you have no measure of whether the drug under trial is better than current drugs.

The financial incentives are not present for any of the parties (including the regulators) to use the higher bar.

Very interesting, and not exactly news, which tells you the last time I looked at this. Obviously, I'm a dinosaur.

Thanks for the pointer.

we truly have no one in the company who has been here before, and that is a problem.

I have bad news: Nobody has been there before.

Perhaps they have managed $10M rev companies before, but they haven't managed your $10M company. No matter what, the prescription is going to be the same:

1. Make serious, solid decisions,

2. Get some of the right

3. Get some of them wrong

4. Course-correct the wrong ones.

I'm taking a wild guess here, but is there any chance the real problem is that you are a bunch of friends? ie, that there is no one with final authority? If so, that will not be solved with a hire.

Anyway, good luck. We should all have such high-quality problems. (btw, currently bootstrapped to 1/10th your number. Prior company founded was an $80M VC-funded company.)

also made DES more resistent to differential cryptanalysis

Was that the result of the last-minute "black box" change? I never heard the result of that, so any light you shed would be welcome.

It's funny, back in those days the equivalent archive of such things were that people would write a book for use in the class.

http://www.amazon.com/Introductory-Network-Theory-Amar-Bose/...

Well put. One addendum:

but I had Dr. Bose as a professor in college and he was a fantastic instructor

Most folks knew him from the audio course. Less known was how long his history of teaching, eg his network theory book in the late sixties. That book was how I learned some of the more exotic transformations. (Most folks know parallel and series. It turns out that there are things like pi-delta/wye-delta and friends.)

RIP.

The body of law in HR matters is completely missing from the post. I'd argue: No post is complete without it, because the mistakes can be so costly (both in lost time/focus with lawyers as well as money.)

I wonder how long it will be until a similar headline about tablets? Eventually that market will also be saturated.

One could also argue that Sequoia now knows the difference between a doomed-to-fail grocery delivery services and a successful one after experiencing it first-hand.

When did they experience a successful one?

Groceries are incredibly low-margin businesses that don't engender a lot of interest from the end users (mutual funds for the IPO stock), not usually the purview of VCs. But perhaps this $200M grocery investment will be the $200M grocery investment that pays off.

In case you need reminding: The reason this is funny is that Sequoia pissed away $200M over WebVan.